Chris Marker: Travelers in Time

French photographer and filmmaker, Chris Marker (b.1921), best known for his conceptual films Sans Soleil and La jetée, has a show of recent photographs at Peter Blum gallery entitled Passengers.

As an avid documentarian Marker had found an ideal recording device
which could candidly photograph people in public spaces: a camera
embedded in a wristwatch. Armed with this device he could pretend to
check the time while discreetly capturing passersby on film. In this new
series, taken in the Paris metro, he uses various photo devices to get a
similar candid feel.

Though this photo-journalistic technique is not unique, the sum of
these images portray people caught in inward journeys, revealing
fragments of inner space: A private face, reserved for the time when one
is alone, not expecting to be recognized; their bodies sag, their faces
are deflated, lacking animation or engagement. People stare through
black, opaque windows into the infinite distance.

Sometimes Marker digitally alters the images to enhance their impact -
in the Soho Gallery there are 4 portraits of passengers juxtaposed next
to historical paintings that draw parallels in aesthetic symmetry.
Women are the photographer's preferred subject and Marker projects his
ideal onto their vacant public faces.

Many of Marker's works are meditations on the moment, and travelogues that intersect physical space and memory. The 29 minute La jetée (1962),
narrated through a series of photo-montages, depicts an experiment in
time travel where the protagonist returns to an incident in his memory
from his childhood in which he recalls an assassination - which later
turns out to be his own. This simple, recursive and haunting plot from
the era of French new wave films, precedes by decades, films such as Inception with their overwhelming dependence on digital acrobatics.

Chris Marker, now in his 90's, continues to experiment
with new technologies and humour. Also, at the Chelsea gallery, is a
folder containing Chris Marker's postcards. This series of postcards of
"How a Grinning Cat Visits the HISTORY OF ART" is worth a peek. Some
time in late 2001 the graffiti of a grinning cat, called M. Chat, more
grin than body, began appearing on the Paris streets - and spreading
quickly in notoriety, began to be used on political posters and
demonstrations occurring in France at the time. Incidentally, Chris
Marker's own cat stars in another of his short "bestiary" films -
forming a part of the diverse reveries of this provocative and
imaginative filmmaker.